


Can't Swim in a Town This Shallow

by Maidenjedi



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:35:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21839824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/pseuds/Maidenjedi
Summary: Mike Hanlon tries to leave Derry.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Can't Swim in a Town This Shallow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theultimateburrito](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theultimateburrito/gifts).



> You can't swim in a town this shallow - you will most assuredly drown tomorrow. - Death Cab for Cutie, "Why You'd Want to Live Here"

It wasn’t a decision any of them made. It just happened, the leaving. 

And, the staying.

Richie was the first. The old man got a job, the schools were better, his mother wanted more sunshine - it was hard to tell, Richie told them all in Lana Turner Voice he was trying out.

Then Ben. He told Mike to watch out for Bev, a bit wistfully. 

Then Eddie and Bill, in the same gray October. Eddie for his health, decreed by his mother. Bill because his own mother took a knife to her wrists. She was okay, but Derry....

Stan. He'd been at the Aladdin for a show, sat with Mike and they shared some Junior Mints. He was gone by morning, his parents stealing away in the night.

Bev, a black eye and broken finger telling Mike everything he needed to know about _why_.

Mike was there to say goodbye, to promise to write, to watch the shuttering behind their eyes. Every time, there was a wistful handshake, a tentative hug. 

“Sure, yeah, I’ll write.” 

“Write down your address again, I don’t want to lose it.”

“Mom doesn’t want me hanging out with you anymore. But I had to come and tell you, we’re moving.”

“Hold down the fort, Mikey. I’ll be back.”

A wave across the street. 

“Don’t forget me. Don’t forget _us._ ”

He was seventeen by the end of it, the leaving. Seventeen, and alone.

-

Truly, he wasn’t alone.

He often walked through town in the morning, on his way to wherever he had to go. Cold mornings, foggy mornings, humid and blazing summer mornings. In the shop windows were flyers, some yellowed, some freshly printed. “Susy Johnson – MISSING.” “10-year-old Jill Goshen – MISSING.” “REWARD - $5000 – EDWARD CORCORAN.” A phone number, hanging off the end, almost an afterthought. _We want to find our daughter, our son, but we don’t have a lot of hope_.

The names stuck with him. Susy, Jill, Eddie. Patrick, Victor, Reginald (no – Belch). Gerry, Jimmy, Rebecca, Robert and his twin sister Roberta, Hillary, Matthew. More and more, all the time. It wasn't like it was in the bad years, but things happened in Derry that didn't happen in Bangor or Ogunquit or Augusta. 

Derry, man. The good died young, sure. So did the bad.

Mike heard their names, and couldn’t get them out of his head. He started wondering about some of them, names listed that he couldn’t put with faces, so he went to look them up. Mike’s obsession – it could be called nothing else - landed him a job at the library since he was there all the time anyway. 

They joked, those who knew him, that Mike was a walking history book. Ask him about that thing that happened in 1930, they’d say, and someone would, and he could repeat details with no clues or prompting. Once, someone wanted to start a Derry Historical Society, and Mike was made secretary – eventually, he was the only one who came.

It was a wonder, truly, that anyone ever stayed.

-

Every fall, a student came to the library looking for the microfiche machine, asking Mr. Hanlon, can you help me find an article about the Kitchener Iron Works?

Sure, kid.

He thought about looking into preservation techniques, convinced every year that he’d open the case and the film would have crumbled or melted. It didn’t.

-

He turned twenty-five and blew out the candles on a cake he bought himself. 

Bill, Stan, Richie, Ben, Bev, Eddie.

He made a wish for each of them. Be safe, be happy. Be free.

-

It was quiet, for a long time. Derry might have been any other town in Maine – except for the cemetery, except for homes deserted in the middle of the night – it was so quiet. 

Mike felt restless. His feet itched, an old-timer might have said. He felt the pull that others must have felt, that Mike hadn’t ever really understood. If Derry was like everywhere else, why not be somewhere else?

“TRAVEL WEST” read a poster in the window of a particularly empty and desolate-looking storefront, an upstart travel agency that had opened in Mike’s senior year of high school. 

Travel west. He began to dream of it.

Maybe It’s gone, he thought, convincing himself. He shelved the books he’d once highlighted and dog-eared, full of the stories that proved his childhood hadn’t been a fantasy. He went on a date. He turned the lights off at night.

 _Gone_.

He went to the Barrens, to other haunts. He said goodbye.

He called a moving company, boxed up his things. Gave notice to his landlord, who had no reaction, so used to his tenants giving up half-way through their lease. Told the city he would need to be replaced at the library. His coworkers gave him a card – “You’ll Be Missed.” 

Mike had waved his hand over a map and counted to ten. His finger landed on San Antonio, Texas.

As far as he knew, none of the Losers were there. But it was fine, really, he needed to get Derry (It, Pennywise, the damned Turtle) out of his head, and Texas was as different from Maine as you could get.

He booked a flight.

-

Mike got on a plane for the first time in his life, expected as he stepped onboard to see something, like in that one episode _of The Twilight Zone_. But that was ridiculous.

Right?

His mind tripped to the mundane. Maybe the plane would experience electrical outages and crash. Maybe he would have a heart attack. Maybe terrorists would take the cockpit.

He laughed nervously and his seatmate edged away from him.

It was an uneventful flight. “Ladies and gentlemen, it has been a pleasure flying with you today.”

When Mike stepped off the plane, someone asked him how the weather was back in Maine.

“Where?”

-

Two weeks in San Antonio. The heat, the Mexican food that jacked with his digestive track, the music. He loved every second. He would hum San Antonio Rose while strolling past the Alamo. He thought about buying a cowboy hat.

-

He was safe. He thought he was safe.

-

He was enjoying the warm fall day, walking past statues, heroes or politicians, who knew. But who cared, with this sun? Why hadn’t he come here sooner?

He thought back through a life lived elsewhere. Where? Derry. Derry was...east. Back east.

Clouds covered the sun, creating shadows where none had been. He’d believed the sun too bright in south Texas for there to be shadows.

There were, though. And things hid in shadows.

_“Mikey….”_

And he ran.

-

He boarded a plane back to Maine on a Wednesday. He didn’t stop to pack or arrange for his things to come back with him. He gripped the armrests and grimaced, waiting for something, not knowing what, just scared, the kind of scared that shriveled your balls and made your stomach flip, the hair on your legs stand up, your toes curl.

But he had to go home. 

He’d been thinking of them, when he walked past the statue.

_“Them who?”_

_“Them! My friends.”_

_“What friends?”_

_“Bob. Val. Robbie?”_

_“Friends whose names you don’t even remember?”_

Somewhere over Ohio, he recalled Bill’s face, his stutter, and nearly wept in relief.

-

The library staff were surprised to see him, stumbling in, tired from the flight, mussed from the drive from Bangor. Every mile had revealed something, brought to mind some childhood exploit (rocks flying past their faces, oh wow he had friends, the smell of pine in the Barrens, Eddie’s tattered Superman books, Ben’s love of chocolate donuts, Bev wearing lip gloss, riding bikes to the movies). Standing there in the library, possibly answering Jolene’s question about Texans riding horses wherever they went, Mike was almost brought to his knees.

He had forgotten it all.

The way the road in front of Miller’s Grocery always flooded in October. The way the moonlight hit the glass on the Kitchener Utility storefront. The clown – always the clown! Graduating from Derry High. Clasping Beverly’s hand as they swore they wouldn’t be the ones to forget, to move on, and then how her dad threw her into a wall and she was done, she was just done, Mikey come with me, Mikey don’t stay, this _town_ ….

This town.

The newspapers from the week were stacked, as they always were, on Mike’s desk, waiting for the moment he could go through them for clippings. He waved off his coworkers, old ladies who liked to hover, and focused on the headline on yesterday’s rag.

“FIVE DEAD IN CAR ACCIDENT; POLICE BLAME ALCOHOL.”

The one underneath, from two days before: “MISSING GIRL FOUND DEAD.”

And so on, every day that Mike had been gone.

“Is it always like this?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

He jumped. Behind him stood Carol Goshen, the woman hired to take his place when he left (Mike remembered: _the grandmother of Jill, who’d gone missing a year before and was never found, the third in a bad month in an off year_ ). He had left, he knew he had, but while he looked at Carol, taking in her red sweater and her smart slacks, grounding himself in the reality that was the woman before him, he suddenly couldn’t remember where he’d been.

“It’s always like this, Mike,” she said, voice quiet, library-hushed.

“Like what?” he said over a dry tongue. He was sure it wasn’t Carol speaking at all.

“The missing. The hurt. The dead. The dying. That’s Derry, Mike. This town….”

She came closer to him, eyes fixed on his, and he knew who was speaking. Not It. But something else, something trying to reach him.

To warn him.

“They’ll come back, you know.”

“Who?”

_Billbenbevstanrichieeddie_

“They’ll come back.”

She reached for Mike’s hand.

“Stay,” she whispered.

-

Mike stayed.

He kept a scrapbook, for the clippings. Some years it was a handful, and in other years, he had to buy more books. That was Derry – a place that should have been burned to the ground and the ground then salted, a place where blind eyes were turned to violence and kids went missing, where anger simmered closer to the surface, where dead things found a home. Sometimes, when the police had done their week’s due diligence and the families had stopped driving the streets at all hours, when the names of the missing and the dead were remembered only as long as the posters stayed in the shop windows, Mike would walk the streets to work and list them out loud.

“Eddie Corcoran. Patrick Hockstetter. Leslie Peters. Sarah Jones. George Denbrough.”

He and his friends, they’d won. Those names had been avenged.

_Not yet. Soon._

He whistled as he walked, and below, deep, a Thing shuddered.


End file.
